This article was written by The Empire State Tribune staff writer Esther Wickham and published on The Empire State Tribune website on March 3rd, 2021. You can read more articles from The Empire State Tribune here.
The McCandlish Phillips Journalism Institute hosted SkepTech, a virtual webinar, last Thursday with bestselling author and political commentator David French.
The discussion centered around the discourse between the government, technology and free speech. Keynote speaker French, who currently serves as senior editor for The Dispatch and as a columnist for Time Magazine, opened the first half of the event with a lecture tackling free speech within technology and Big Tech companies.
“We’re weighting into a topic that has been more dominated by ignorance and outright dishonesty surrounding Section 230 and free-speech online,” French said.
Screenshot Courtesy of Esther Wickham
Discussing Section 230, French outlined why there is no trust between the government and individuals. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This act aims to provide immunity from legal responsibilities to Big Tech companies that decide to censor violent content on their social media platforms.
“Online speech was specifically created for moderation but is not being treated much like offline speech. The real object is not their bigness. It’s their ideology,” French said. “You begin to realize that your lines of communication to your public are in the hands of people who do not like your speech, and so you feel an enormous sense of vulnerability.”
French concluded his lecture by restating the main reason why we are having these discussions.
“We need to be careful not to let micro issues distract us from macro truth,” French said.
In the second half of the event, French moderated a panel of guest speakers, including Dr. Mary Anne Franks, professor at the University of Miami School of Law, Al Sikes, current President of Hearst New Media, and Scott Lincicome, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Cato Institute. The panelists then discussed how Section 230 is giving more power to big companies.
“With Section 230, these big dominating companies get this bubble wrap protection around them while private citizens don’t get special protection,” Franks said.
The panelist concluded that these big companies could do more harm than good with this legal protection.